Far Beyond the Stars Read online

  Pabst sighed deeply and sincerely. "The way I see it," he said, "you can either burn it or you can put it in a drawer for fifty years or however long it takes the human race to become color-blind."

  "But I want people to read it now."

  Pabst's voice dropped, became very low, direct, and calm. "You want me to publish it?" he asked. "Then make the captain white."

  That last word resounded in the room. They all knew that that was exactly, precisely the truth. And all of them understood what Benny was going to say. "But that's not what I wrote," he said. His voice sounded terribly small, a whisper in a whirlwind.

  Pabst shrugged. For him, there was really no debate. In all honesty, the discussion was already over. "It's your decision," he said. Then he turned and headed back into his office.

  The others seemed to find things to busy themselves with: paper clips, memos, quiet conversations. Not one of them wanted to intrude on Benny's misery. Not one of them didn't wish to be elsewhere. It is rarely entertaining to watch a friend skinned alive.

  Benny looked at the new picture. And at his manuscript. He could write a new story, and give up the work that he had done. But that wouldn't be true to his muse. No one would ever read this story. No one would know how good he was. This story would make him, he knew it.

  On the other hand, if he changed the captain's race, if he removed Benjamin Sisko's color from the equation, something even worse would happen.

  There was a world inside him, a world where a planetary Federation held together a coalition of planets and species. It was a world without poverty, with little crime. With no starvation. With one hundred percent education.

  And in a world where humans and Vulcans and Klingons and Bajorans strove to find peace and harmony, the relatively trivial differences between human beings simply meant nothing.

  A lovely world.

  And Benjamin Sisko, the Federation's finest, a man of intelligence, nerve and decision, was what he was. He was Negro. If Benny changed that, the entire delicate fabric to the universe he had created might collapse, never to resurrect itself. His muse might never speak again. All of those lovely tribbles, and Starfleet vessels, and warp drives, and everything else would simply …

  Evaporate, as if they had never existed at all.

  He had to make a choice. But what? What should he do?

  More importantly, what would Benjamin Sisko do?

  SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER 16

  1940

  IT WAS CLOSE TO ELEVEN by the time that Benny Russell returned home from the Fair. Home was a brownstone walk-up, on East 127th Street, one which might have been comfortable were it shared with his mother and father. But one was dead, and the other gone forever. Benny shared it with his mother's sister Ardelia, a good-hearted woman with an unfortunate addiction to the numbers.

  Benny staggered through the front door, feeling unexpectedly weary, calling out: "Ardelia?" and hearing no reply. So—his aunt was still at the policy bank, where she made the majority of her income.

  Not a bad business, but an addict like Ardelia needed to put some distance between herself and temptation. Almost any money she made counting slips went right back into her bosses' hands. The rent was currently two months late, and the landlord was screaming bloody murder.

  Benny hadn't had time or energy to think about that. He collapsed onto the couch and fell almost immediately into a deep and dream-filled slumber.

  Aunt Ardelia was cooking breakfast by the time he awakened, and the smell of bacon and grits filled the apartment. Benny was suddenly and almost overwhelmingly possessed by a ravenous hunger. He rolled clumsily off the couch and thumped onto the floor.

  "Ardelia?" he said, pulling his pants on. He hopped his way into the kitchen in time to watch his aunt crack an egg on the side of the skillet.

  Ardelia Mathis was a big, brown woman with a generous figure that still resisted gravity admirably. She gave him a big grin and said, "Sit on down, boy, breakfast be up in just a minute. Now, I 'spect you to tell me all about Mr. Bojangles, or you don't even get a bite!"

  That sounded like a good deal to him. So in-between huge helpings of steaming grits, eggs so tender they almost melted in his mouth, and bacon that managed to be both crisp and juicy at the same time, he told her all about the fair …

  Except for the Dogon exhibit. For some reason, he couldn't quite remember anything connected with it, and barely recalled that he had gone there at all.

  She listened and laughed, and pursed her mouth into an "O" at his description of the Futurama, and swore that she was going to get out there, she really should, and that she would have some money soon because she just knew she was about to hit the number. As she put it, "I just saw a cat get her tail caught in a door, and in Professor Kinder's book, that means my number will be 874." She nodded her head as if this datum was as reliable as the Rock of Gibraltar. "Yes it is."

  He sighed. "Was it a male or female cat?" he asked dryly.

  "What do you mean?" she asked.

  "Was it male or female? Simple question."

  She screwed up her face. "Why, I don't know. And why should I?"

  "Well, I read the book too, and as I recall—female cats are 874, but male cats are 875."

  Her mouth popped into an "o" of surprise, and she dashed off to her bedroom to grab her book and check. Before the heavy sound of her footfalls had faded, he had grabbed another strip of bacon from the pan and skedaddled out of the front door, considering it the better part of valor to vanish before she discovered he was lying.

  East 127th Street had been home to Benny for as long as he could remember: he knew the neighborhood like he knew the sound of his own pulse. He could sit on the stoop and tell you when the numbers runners would pass with their policy slips, when the milkman would make his deliveries, when the bakery truck would sputter past.

  He knew the barbers and the liquor store owners. He knew the street preachers and the prostitutes.

  He was fascinated by the latter, and knew that one day soon he would take the advice of his older, wiser friends, and invest some capital in one of the loudly-dressed, flashy, laughing women who flirted with him, with everyone. After that investment, there would be certain mysteries of life that would be known to him, certain curtains which would remain forever lifted.

  Soon, but not today.

  He was still confused about what had happened at the Fair, and wasn't certain whether to talk to his friends about it, or just keep it to himself. He certainly couldn't trust his fading memories to Aunt Ardelia—she would just squeal and try to find an entry in one of her dream books that would relate his experience to the upcoming number.

  She hadn't always been like this; her world hadn't always revolved around the shadow-land of numbers betting. He remembered when she was a hardworking, loving woman, married to a good man. But she had lost that good man in one of the terrible fires that haunted this neighborhood, one of the roaring blazes over on the border of Spanish Harlem, supposedly started by a Cuban immigrant who didn't understand that you couldn't build a fire in the middle of the floor.

  She had lost everything in that blaze, including the only man she loved. He supposed that soon after that she had ceased believing that human dreams or efforts could bend the hand of fate, and just gave in to the worship of blind fortune.

  A good woman. Once, a church-going woman. Now, just someone who gave him a roof to sleep under.

  She had already left this morning, heading down to the policy bank, counting slips. Making someone rich. That was just the way of the world. Once, a year ago, she had taken him to her boss man, her work place. It was hidden in a tenement building (hidden—hah! Every cop in town knew where all the policy banks were). It was a room piled high with change, dollar bills, and little slips of paper saying who had bet what and where.

  She had worked in one of those joints since before his mother died, even before his Daddy had gone away, following the music that didn't seem to want him any more.
r />   But before that, both Ardelia and her sister, his mother, Emma, had been dancers at the Cotton Club—the Geller sisters, and that was where Emma Geller had met his daddy.

  The Cotton Club opened in 1922 at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in quarters formerly occupied by the Douglas Casino and the Club Delux. A genteel mobster named Owny Madden ran the club—and half the New York gangs—from a curtained table in the back of the room.

  They didn't admit colored customers, but on the stage—the stage!! Such a collection of talent had never been seen in one place at one time before.

  Duke Ellington opened there in 1927, debuting his trademarked "jungle sound." He actually recorded some of his best sides right there on the stage. The list of famous names was endless: Ed "Snakehips" Tucker, Evelyn Welch, Bill Robinson, and Buck and Bubbles; the comedian Stepin Fetchit; jazz orchestras led by Cab Calloway, Andrew Preer, Louis Armstrong, and Jimmie Lunceford; the songwriter Harold Arlen; and the singers Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, and Ivie Anderson.

  Emma Geller had met her man, "Fox" Russell, at the Cotton Club. Fox was a tall, elegant hipster who played piano for the Duke himself. Emma and "Fox" had mixed like nitro and glycerin, and they'd married in 1923. It was a good time for them, even when the Geller sisters broke up so that Emma could have a child, her only child, Benny. She returned to work two years later, dazzling the crowds with the trademarked steps those girls had practiced since they were six.

  But everything changes in this world, and the once glittering crowds began to shrink, perhaps no longer thrilled to take the trip to "Darktown." The declining fortunes of the Cotton Club had influenced the Russell family. Benny's father had started drinking and it had influenced his performance. When the Cotton Club made its move to Broadway and 48th in 1936, "Fox" Russell hadn't gone with it.

  Things had gone even worse for his marriage, and it wasn't long before "Fox" didn't have much time for home any more. When he seemed to look forward to his road trips.

  Not too much money seemed to make its way back to Benny and his mother. Ardelia found a good man to marry, who forbade her to dance, and was wealthy enough—he owned real estate in Spanish Harlem—to keep her in the style she was happy to grow accustomed to. Ardelia retired, and the dancing duet called the Geller sisters was history.

  By working at a laundry during the day and dancing where she could at night, Emma was able to keep things going. Benny offered to drop out to help, but his mother would have nothing of it. A beautiful, cream-colored mulatto woman who had once been courted all over Harlem, she could easily have passed for white, but hadn't, and now, with Benny as living testimony to her ethnicity, couldn't.

  So Emma tucked away her dreams of glory, or even comfort and ease, and worked, and worked, and worked.

  And if the poverty and its depravations sometimes seemed to consume her, she found her comforts in the church, and her sister's loving marriage.

  But when a tenement fire consumed not only Ardelia's husband but most of her financial security, the sisters seemed to collapse toward a common center. Each leaned heavily upon the other, and both lost a little emotional balance. They began to show too much vulnerability to snake-oil scams, lucky tokens and pyramid schemes, gambling, lotteries, and every other way to hold onto some kind of dream that maybe, someday, somehow, there would be a way out for their family.

  Emma finally broke in 1936, her health failing, and she died two years later. Benny moved in with Ardelia.

  By this point Ardelia gambled so regularly that the runners all knew her, and when one of the higher-ups heard that she had pawned her wedding ring to raise money, they finally offered her a job.

  She was a local star, a famous beauty, fallen on hard times, and it was their way of taking care of their own.

  Summer days in Harlem were filled with games and laughter, friendly firemen uncapping fire hydrants to give respite from the blazing sun, kids collecting bottles to save money for ice cream or movies.

  Ordinarily, Benny would have passed the time with his friends, but today, he found himself keeping away from them, finding quiet places to sit, staring at the sky.

  Something was wrong with his eyes. When people walked by, he could see ghosts trailing behind them … and extending in front of them, which was even creepier. Sometimes he would look at a group of people, and they were all like a train of souls, extended forward and back. He didn't know what was happening and just before he panicked, the effect stopped.

  Twice, he heard auto horns before the horns blew. Once, he stepped aside on the street before a pie fell from a second-story kitchen ledge. And then, walking down the street, he bumped into a rack of clothing that had yet to be pushed out onto the sidewalk.

  Benny stood, shivering, watching the cars, and the people pass him, seeing each of them not just as they were, but as they would be in a few more seconds, as if motion picture images were overlapping drastically. In a movie theater, the effect might have been comical.

  Here, and now, it was terrifying. He ran home, curled up on the couch, and slept until dark.

  Dreaming of stars.

  Benny sat on the stoop, looking up at the sky. What was it about those stars? He had never paid them such attention before. Had he just never noticed how beautiful they were?

  "Benny!" he heard her before he saw her. Benny's heart raced when he caught a glimpse of Ardelia coming down the street. She was, to him, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Despite her fatigue, and he knew that she had just finished working a twelve-hour day, she still moved with a dancer's grace.

  "Benny." Her face lit up at the sight of him. She bent down and kissed his forehead. "Did you have a good day?"

  "Great, Ardelia." He wanted to tell her about the stars, but couldn't quite. Couldn't bring himself to go into that part of it. Not quite yet. So he told her more about the fair, and the Futurama, and the train ride, and the crowds, and about that moment in the ride when Jenny had touched his hand.

  She smiled, hoisting her tired weight up the steps. He held the door for her. "Well," she said. "You never know. You may have something there, yet. But she has … a certain reputation, you know. Be careful."

  "I will," Benny said. The hallway inside glowed with a bare light bulb, the stair rug was threadbare, and the stairs creaked under their feet.

  "Yes. Don't you go crossing that Willie. He's got a bad temper, I hear." She turned the key to let them into their apartment, then stopped, trembling with excitement.

  "But I have some good news," she whispered. "On the way home, I looked in the mirror, and my reflection didn't quite look like me. I looked younger."

  He helped her off with her coat.

  "Ardelia," he said. "You're getting younger every day."

  She shushed him and continued. "No, really. And you know what it says in Madame French's book, don't you?"

  He winced. "No—what?"

  "It says that reflections are a key to hitting the number." She sighed, straightened, letting her spine work some of the crackles out, and then went to her bookshelf, running her finger across the contents for a shelf before finding the one she wanted.

  "Here …" she made her way quickly through the book, until she came to the reference she wanted.

  He knew what Madame French's book was, of course. Most Harlemites did—French, or one of the innumerable other numerical prophets who claimed to help you hit the daily number based upon signs in dreams, or pig entrails, or cloud formations, or reflections, or the number of hairs on your comb.

  Madame French was one of the very best. He had watched his aunt attending one of her revival meetings, held down at the old Showcase Theater, and had to admit that French, garbed in her voluminous robes and waving her hands theatrically over the sea of dark faces watching her worshipfully, put on a very good show indeed.

  But he resented it that his aunt's substance continued to be drained, day after day, year after year, even when the old fraud was working her magic on some distant crowd. It felt wrong, but there w
as little or nothing that he could do for it.

  "Here it is," Ardelia said, excitedly. She thrust the book under his nose, her finger marking out the pertinent entry.

  "When in a dream, or in real life, and a REFLECTION appears to you, and the REFLECTION is different from your own age, younger, the number is 673. Older, the number is 782. Add or subtract your age from these numbers, of course, depending on the color of your morning urine as described on page …"

  "Oh, Ardelia," he groaned, throwing the book down. "Can't you see what this is? That it's just a bunch of crap?" A copy of the Times was laying on the stand by the couch, and he flipped to the stock page. There, at the top of the page, were the closing totals, the last three numbers of which formed the daily Number. He felt furious. "I could just make up a number at random—," he said, but then, staring at it, he stopped.

  "I suppose that you could do better," she said.

  "No—," but his vision had begun to blur, the numbers dancing and jittering before his eyes, and the edges of the page seemed to multiply, as if he held not just today's paper, but yesterday's, and . . .

  (Tomorrow's)

  The voice was tiny inside him, but insistent. And he was surprised to hear it.

  (Yes) it said again, and he closed his eyes, and he saw something, saw the Orb, the glowing hourglass of the Orb, and he was stumbling back, and he crashed against the wall, drawing thumping protestations from the couple on the far side.

  When he opened them again, his Aunt was staring at him with concern. "Benny?" she said. "Are you all right?" Her face was filled with alarm and … and something else. But what?

  He waved her away. "Yeah," he said. "Sure, I'm all right."

  "It's just …"

  There was something about her voice that made him stop. "Just what?" he asked.

  "It's just that you never offered me a number before."